Email Click Rates Stable in Q3 2017; Open Rates Decline

Email click rates in North America have failed to increase on a year-over-year basis for 18 consecutive quarters, per Epsilon’s latest quarterly review [download page] of client activity. The Q3 2017 report shows the average click-through rate at 3.1%, consistent with the year-earlier period.

But if – and it’s a big if – click rates are stabilizing, that doesn’t mean marketers are out of the woods yet. Now it looks like open rates are a concern: the average open rate of 31.2% in Q3 2017 was down from 34.1% during the year-earlier period, and marked the third consecutive quarter featuring a year-over-year decrease.

That comes after a sustained period of growth in open rates.

Clearly these are aggregate trends – and individual results vary – but they’re nonetheless instructive in understanding overall response to email over time.

Marketing Emails Continue to Underperform

Some 93.1% of emails sent by Epsilon clients during Q3 were classified as marketing messages, meaning that they contained merchandise information and incentives for purchasing.

These emails performed considerably worse than other email types, registering a 19.4% open rate (vs. the 31.2% average) and a 1.5% click rate (vs. the 3.1% average).

Some industries fared better than others with their marketing emails, though. The “Financial Services CC/Banks” sector, for example, achieved an impressive 50.7% open rate for marketing emails during the quarter. The “Consumer Products/CPG” industry, by comparison, managed only a 9.6% open rate on its marketing emails. However, the industry made up for it with a healthy click-to-open rate on those emails, of 14%.